1. Field of The Invention
Applicant's invention relates to instruments and tools useful for incising biologic tissues.
2. Background Information
The cutting of tissue is fundamental to surgical intravention in cases of disease or trauma. A most traditional surgical cutting instrument is, of course, the scalpel. In many orthopedic procedures, saws, drills, chisels and other relatively primitive cutting implements are used. As evidenced by the wide-spread application of lasers, for many procedures, particularly the more modern micro-surgical procedures, the scalpel and the various orthopedics tools are not suitable cutting implements.
With particular reference to orthopedic procedures, scalpels are certainly not suitable for cutting bone and those tools which are require considerable working space and involve significant risk of inadvertent injury to surrounding tissues. Miniaturization of orthopedic cutting implements has, in many cases, merely rendered tools which are too delicate to be effective and/or which are highly prone to breakage. Furthermore, the best of miniaturized cutting tools for orthopedic applications are still too bulky for many procedures and are quite expensive.
Notwithstanding its many advantages, even the laser has many drawbacks--it is not known to be particularly effective for bone cutting and it produces substantial heat which renders charred debris and which posses a threat to any closely adjacent delicate tissues or structures. Also, the laser has the potential for effecting substantial harm if the user over-shoots the intended target.
It would be highly advantageous to surgical practitioners to provide a novel cutting implement which over-comes the many limitations of the cutting implements of the prior art. Such a novel cutting implement would ideally posses the following characteristics: 1) it would not rely upon the use of heat to cut or produce heat in its operation; 2) it would not produce charred or foreign material debris; 3) the implement component which directly effects the cut would be highly compact and easily manipulated by the user; 4) the implement would facilitate complex cuts; 5) the implement would have utility in cutting virtually any biologic tissue, in part, by virtue of easily varied cutting force; and 6) the implement utilizes cutting means which are effective only at very close range thereby rendering the implement safer than cutting instruments of the prior art.
Ideally, such an ideal surgical cutting implement would use a biologically benign fluid jet as its cutting means, an objective which has, as yet, been unachievable due to impediments in generating a sterile fluid stream which are inherent in apparatus designs for water jet cutting tools in the prior art.